Making the most of your triggered emails: birthday edition

Tuesday, February 28, 2017
Listrak
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For being so short, February is a pretty big month, giving email marketers many excuses to engage their audiences. There's Groundhog Day, Valentine’s Day, National Eat-Ice-Cream-for-Breakfast Day (Google it, it’s a thing), and my personal favorite holiday: my birthday!

Over the years, I’ve taken note of which retailers send me birthday gifts and which just send celebratory emails (both are appreciated, but let’s be honest – this girl likes her presents, so I open those first). As an email designer (and lover of freebies), I take special notice of what’s in my inbox.

One of my favorite birthday emails every year comes from DSW. It usually includes a $5 off offer, but this year they switched things up.

In January, I received this email:

And then in February, I received my $5 off coupon:

The first message caught my eye with this line: “get your wish list primed, prepped, and sent for the big day.” It’s asking you to start thinking about what you want for your birthday – like, “here, come build your wish list on our website with our products.” And then in a month, they send you a coupon to entice you to come back and buy what’s on your wish list, or buy more if you’ve already received those items for your birthday.

Because birthday campaigns are so successful as one standalone message, think about how successful they could be if you directed your customers to your website before, during, and after their birthday.

Pro tip: if you really want to catch their eye, try calling your subscriber by their first name in the subject line. Emails with subject lines that include first name personalization have 17% higher unique open rates on average than emails that don’t include personalization.

Have you tried any unique ideas with your brand’s birthday campaign? Try switching up when you send -- before, during, or after (pssst… “belated” messages actually do really well).

Elsie Compton
Listrak Professional Services Graphic Designer

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Recovering Site Abandoners at Every Touchpoint

Friday, February 24, 2017
Listrak
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On-site conversation rates can be broken down into two parts: product-to-cart and cart-to-checkout. Industry averages tell us that product-to-cart conversion rates average 8.7% while cart-to-checkout averages 25-30%. Overall site conversion rates average 2.5%.

While the 2016 numbers represent big increases over the 2015 numbers – product-to-cart increased 74% and cart-to-checkout increased 78.5% - brands need to do everything they can to not only get more shoppers to checkout during the initial site visit, but attract and re-engage them after they leave the site to recover those lost sales.

Increase Your Reachable Rate

The average retailer has email addresses for about 20-25% of their site visitors. Increasing that even 10% will make a huge difference to your bottom line.

We worked with one of our clients to increase its reachable rate to 35%, which was achieved by adding a pop-up, new subscription forms and other optimization tactics. This meant that the shopping cart recovery message could reach more shoppers, resulting in three times more revenue and an 18% increase in overall revenue attributed to the email channel. The shopping cart abandonment campaign also had a 14 times higher conversion rate than any other email promotion.

Think a pop-up or lightbox acquisition tactic isn’t for you? Think again. In our recent trend report, we found that 55% of retail sites we shopped used a pop-up to acquire email address. Our clients routinely see annual list growth rates of 45% after implementing a pop-up, with an additional 15% coming through if they also do an exit pop-up. Best of all, 3-7% of those new subscribers convert.

Acquisition rates jumped even higher for clients who tested a full screen takeover.

Personalizing Recovery Campaigns – Use Your Data

Browse and shopping cart recovery messages work best when they not only feature the products left behind, but also additional product recommendations based on the shopper’s browse history. If it is the shopper’s first visit and you don’t have much data, show product recommendations using the “browsed this / purchased that” or “purchased this / purchased that” algorithm. It’s no longer enough to show just new or top selling merchandise, or for the CEO or merchandiser to pick out products to show to every shopper, or even for recommendations to be in the same category or sub-category of the browsed merchandise.

Our clients have seen amazing lifts in revenue following these best practices. After just two months, one client experienced a 13% increase in email revenue with 14% of conversions coming from new customers and a whopping 63% of campaign revenue coming from the product recommendations.

No email address? No problem.

Even if you focus on acquisition tactics, the sad reality is that you will still be missing the chance to re-engage two-thirds of your site visitors if you rely on email alone.

That’s where Lead Ads and Programmatic Display Ads can really come in handy.

One of our clients set up Facebook Lead Ads through our new Listrak Exchange solution, showing ads to site visitors who abandoned a product page or cart. In six months, they’ve acquired nearly 9,000 new subscribers through this channel at a cost of $ .87 per email address. More importantly, 20.8% have already converted. It saw a 6X ROAS within the first 30 days of launching the program.

Another client tested our new Programmatic Display Ads solution, showing personalized ads to shoppers who only visited the home page, browsed products but didn’t add items to the cart, abandoned a cart, and purchased. The average ROAS of the four campaigns was 7.25x, with the cart abandonment segment coming in a 13x ROAS. Learn more in our Programmatic Whitepaper.

When adding programmatic ads, it is important that your personalization engine powers your online recommendations, email recommendations and display ad recommendations or else the shoppers will have an inconsistent and confusing experience with your brand.

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Creating Customer Loyalty: Hooray, you made a sale! Now what?

Thursday, February 16, 2017
Listrak
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So you made a sale! Congrats! It's time to break out the champagne, sit back, and bask in your newfound wealth... right?

Wrong.

Keeping your customers engaged is how you create repeat purchases, and repeat purchases are the name of the game. But how, exactly, do you keep your customers engaged long-term?

Send a loyalty
message to your biggest fans

Simply saying “thank you” is an extremely effective way to
show your customers how much you care, and by showing them you care, your
customers will feel appreciated and come back for more lovin’.

Use purchase data to figure out who your best customers
are. This could be based upon total spend, how often they purchase, or whether or not they buy certain high-end products or brands.

In the message itself, include some copy that really shows
your appreciation. “We think you’re great” or “Thanks for being so amazing”
will demonstrate your love. You can even take it a step
further and give them an exclusive gift or discount, just for being so darn special.

Hint: we normally send loyalty or "thank you" messages
three days after a purchase, as long as you're also immediately sending an e-receipt or order confirmation email.

Send a win-back
message to those who may have forgotten you

Saying “I miss you” always makes people feel cherished. If
you find yourself losing customers after a period of time, then a win-back
campaign is a good tactic to reel them back in before it’s too late.

Take a look at your customer life-cycle metrics to determine when
your customers usually drop off. You'll want to send your win-back campaign before that point. Hint: if you're not sure where your drop-off point is, we normally default to somewhere between 90- and 180-days of lapsed purchase activity.

When it comes to content, let your customers know how much
you miss them with some sweet and caring language. Lead them back to your site
to show them what they’ve been missing with a call-to-action to see what's new, and display new arrivals with personalized product recommendations.

And the best way to get them back? Offer a promotion that’s better than the norm. If a 10% off sale is regular fare for your brand, test out 15 or 20% with your win-back campaign to see if you get a lift. If you offer free shipping every day, offer free 2-day. Remember: it's cheaper and easier to sell to current customers than to find new ones, so do what it takes to keep them buying.

Send a review request
message if you love feedback

Decision-making is hard, and buyer's remorse stinks. That’s why we rely on our peers’ advice before we take a leap and make a purchase decision.

After your customer has had some time to enjoy their most
recent purchase, drop them a message encouraging them to leave a review. Hint: we normally send review request
messages 7-14 days after your customer’s order has shipped, but you should customize this for your products and your shipping speed.

In the message, make sure the copy thanks the
customer for purchasing in the first place and hopes that they’re enjoying
their item. Then encourage them to leave a review of their purchase in order to
help their peers make a decision.

Test, test, test!

On my Listrak Professional Services team, we rely on best-practice data to help us make campaign recommendations. For your brand, however, take the initiative to run split-tests (for 90-days on automated campaigns, minimum!) to determine what content, timing, and discounting works best for your audience.

Which post-purchase campaign do you think you’ll try next? Sound
off below!

You open the message and it shows you some
tees you added to your cart earlier that day but didn’t buy.

They ask if
you still want them.

They tell you to “Grab Your Baggins.”

You laugh... and you buy.

So the #1 reason to push the copy envelope is...?

Your audience. That person lazing on the couch watching Netflix who needs something disruptive enough to distract them from the upside-down.

May I have your
attention, please?

Your customers get a ton of emails every day, so
you need to stand out. You only have 3 seconds to grab their attention,
so you better do it right!

Craft a noticeable subject line that gets
them to open your message – something that just screams, “Hey! I'm different than those other emails! Open me!” Don’t
use those exact words, obviously (or go ahead and try it, you never know).

Ditch the khakis for
some tie-dye

After you get your customer to open your email, you need
them to actually read it, so have fun with it! Don’t be plain and boring – your customer gets enough of
that. Stand out by being more engaging, witty, fun, or quirky than everyone else. Whatever "being different" means for your brand in your industry – do it!

Be
the email they actually look forward to getting in their inbox every day.

Relationship status: shopping

$20 says your customers don't just want black-tie you. They want
old-pajamas-with-pizza-stains you, too! They want a brand they know they can trust
and return to time and time again. Give your audience the opportunity to emotionally engage
with your brand and build a long-term, multi-faceted relationship with you.

Think you’ll give it a try? Let us know
in the comments!By Alicia Morrissey, Listrak Professional Services Copywriter